Unruly Reflections: The First $15

A weird tale of ad revenue 🤑

Mar 30, 2022

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Okay, that title is a little disingenuous. Thanks to you all, I made my first $15 podcasting in the first couple of days after the first trailer dropped. (That support was overwhelming by the way--those of you who have been paying subscribers since day one, THANK YOU, you have no idea how much it means to me.)

So let's talk specifically about ad revenue.

Ads are something Substack is notably against. I don't love ads either, and when I listen to podcasts I usually just skip right through them.

When I first started producing Unruly Figures I had no idea what my income from it would look like, if indeed I would ever have any income from it at all. But, uhm, making this podcast is expensive y'all. It's not just the equipment, but access to books and research about the people I cover doesn't come cheap. Sometimes books are available for free online on apps like Perlego or Archive.org, but often they're not.

At the time, I was working a part-time job for $17/hour. I knew that I would have to monetize if I wasn’t going to go completely broke making this.

Here's how I tried to solve the money problem:

First, I turned on paid subscriptions here. I didn’t think many people would do it, but I didn’t want to leave the option off and deny myself the chance for it. But I had little confidence it would work out, so I looked into ads too.

Since I was already using Anchor for the background music to Unruly Figures, I thought I might as well use Anchor to push to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else. And since I was doing that, I thought I might as well turn on ads, just to see what would happen.

Like a lot of people, I didn't actually know how ads in podcasts worked before I started podcasting. Since I work in social media marketing, I had some idea of how ads work generally, but I didn't know much about the standards and metrics specific to podcasting. I knew that I probably wouldn't have enough listeners to attract any big companies for a while, but I felt okay putting in the work until then.

Pretty quickly though, just before episode 2 was due to go live, I had enough listeners that I got offered a native ad with Anchor, advertising Anchor to my listeners. I recorded the ad and added it to the ad library, which rotates ads into episodes probably based on the listener.

The offered pay for the ad was $15 per thousand impressions. That means that people had to listen to at least part of the ad one thousand times for me to make $15. (This also means that if people are good at skipping ads and don't hear any of it, their listen doesn't count toward the requisite 1000, and many people are very good at skipping ads.)

Knowing that, I made very little effort for this ad. I'll just admit it. I recorded it once, spent five minutes editing, and uploaded it. I haven't revisited it once.

Because, uh, $15 is not a lot of money? If I had a much larger audience with thousands of people listening, those 1000 listens might have piled up pretty quickly, making an okay amount of money. But just starting out? No way. I had like 80 listeners at the time! I wasn't going to spend a bunch of time on that little ad because the ROI just wasn't there.

Ads don’t make creators rich, just companies. Source.

So, how long did it take to make $15?

It happened after episode 9. A couple of days before I posted the Edward VIII episode (episode 10), I noticed there were just a few cents over $15 in my Anchor Wallet, and decided to pay myself.

That was in early February. The ad had been running since at least early October. Five months! It took five months of episodes with ads playing for me to make $15. $3 per month.

It felt funny because, on the one hand, I'd already made hundreds of dollars through Substack. The podcast had paid for itself (meaning, I had made back the money I spent on equipment and books so far) about two months before. I looked over the hours and hours of work I had done leading up to episode 10--hundreds of hours of work--and laughed. $15?!

I say all this not to complain about Anchor or ad revenue, exactly. I'm a writer, we're a notoriously impoverished group; I'll take $15 where I can get it.

I say this because I think people think making podcasts makes you rich. Or, at least, is a financially viable career. Just throw up some ads and you'll be rich! And in the old model, the ad model, it is if you have thousands of listeners.

That model is not designed to pay people fairly or equitably. It's not designed to make creators rich, just companies.

Without a place like Substack (or the other podcaster standby, Patreon), there would be no way that creators with small dedicated audiences (like you and me!) would survive.

So, thank you for paying for this podcast. It may not feel like $6/month is much, but drawn together it ensures that I can actually buy the books I need to keep researching and producing without going into debt.

Will I keep ads going?

Ah, the $15-per-thousand-impressions question.

The truth is that for now, yeah, I will keep the ads going. As the audience grows I make slightly more money; since my ~big payday~ in early February I've already "made" $7. (Anchor doesn't allow you to do payouts until you've made $15.) Maybe I’ll start getting offered ads that come with better payouts. It's a viable option for people who can't or don't want to pay for a subscription to support creators. I know ads are blah, but let them play!

I'd like to someday get to the point where I don't need to have ads turned on to make a sustainable income from this podcast. And that day might be soon! Who knows? But creators have to eat and pay their student loans too, so until I can do that solely from here, the ads will have to stay. In ~this economy~ it feels like a necessary evil.